Politics

You have to watch the House of Lords carefully these days. Whenever a Bill on some fairly general subject, like crime, is passing through it, pressure groups regularly intervene and slip in their own pet amendments. This week it is the turn of a legal ginger group called Art not Evidence. They have got sympathetic peers Shami Chakrabarti and Doreen Lawrence to put forward an amendment to the otherwise fairly unexciting Victims and Courts Bill. This amendment would prevent any ‘creative or artistic expression’ from being used as evidence against a criminal defendant unless its literal meaning directly implicates them in the crime charged.  Still none the wiser? There is, as you

It looks as if £300 will end up being to Ed Miliband what 45 minutes was to Tony Blair: the number which will forever hang around his neck, dragging him down whatever else he tries to do in politics. Of late, Miliband seems to have stopped repeating his promise to cut £300 from our electricity bills by 2030 as he decarbonizes the electricity grid. And no wonder when Centrica boss Chris O’Shea revealed yesterday his own company’s projections for electricity prices in 2030. They show that far from falling, we will be paying more for power then than we were in the wake of the Ukraine invasion in 2022. Given

Not for the first time, Nigel Farage has hit a nerve. At a rally in Birmingham, the Reform UK leader took aim at an increasingly sacred cow in modern Britain: working from home. He called for ‘an attitudinal change to hard work rather than work-life balance’ and claimed ‘people aren’t more productive working from home, it’s a load of nonsense – they’re more productive being with other fellow human beings and working as part of a team.’ Cue a social media meltdown. What’s curious about the backlash to Farage’s comments is that it comes from all quarters. The influential right-wing commentator Mahyar Tousi called the comments ‘100 per cent false